The Adobe Experience Manager ACS Commons Generic List facilitates authorable Title / Value pairs that can be used to populate drop downs from a centrally authored location. The functionality of the Generic List is limited to the Title and Value pairs, but there could be other use cases for centrally managed metadata that can be easily chosen from a dropdown. This example will extend the Generic List to manage metadata for organizational units / departments.

If you are not subscribed to Adobe’s Security Bulletins, you might not have heard about the recent security update issued by Adobe for all supported versions of AEM (6.0 - 6.4). Quoting their press release:
Adobe has released security updates for Adobe Experience Manager. These updates resolve two reflected cross-site scripting vulnerabilities rated Moderate, and three stored cross-site scripting vulnerabilities rated Important that could result in sensitive information disclosure.

I recently had a request from a client who wanted to use a third party service that didn’t provide an authentication key. Instead I need to use a simple username and password combo that the client didn’t want exposed in our code repository where we generally keep our configuration values.
Having heard about encrypted configuration values, I set out to learn how to use them. I found a variety of resources out there, but none of them really walked me through from Point A to Point B.

In the rush of everyone talking about the newest features of AEM 6.4, something was overlooked. Those of us that were familiar with the Classic UI in Adobe Experience Manager, and how everything worked in it, were thrown for a bit of a loop when the Touch UI was first introduced in AEM 5.6. Not only was everything in a new spot or organized in a different way, but the method to get to those places also changed.

In a previous article, Tyler Maynard of Hoodoo Digital, pointed out that the Adobe Experience Manager documentation for Using Client-Side Libraries did not expressly state that static resources needed to be within a folder path named “resources”. This prompted me to submit a ticket to the AEM documentation team to correct this error. They have now changed their documentation to reflect this requirement.
No word yet on the feature enhancement request to make this a configurable item so that you can specify your own path.

Some of you may already be aware of the Experience League. It’s been around since early 2018, but it was a big push at Adobe Summit 2018. That’s where I ran into Cary Burgess and Scott MacDonald. They took some time to talk to me about the Experience League. The goal of the League is to help connect people that are users of Adobe Experience Manager, and help make them successful.

If you’re planning on moving towards Adobe Experience Managers recommended pattern for clientlibs in AEM 6.3+, by storing all clientlibs in ‘/apps’ and setting ‘allowProxy=“{Boolean}true”’ so that they will be proxied by the new ‘/etc.clientlibs/’ servlet, you must store referenced assets (like images) under a folder named ‘resources’. Although this is not explicitly stated in the documentation, using any other folder name will not work.
As you can see in the image above, the Using Client-Side Libraries documentation examples DO use this pattern, but they don’t make any explicit statements regarding the folder naming requirements.

One of the real highlights during Adobe Summit 2018 was the AEM Rockstar session. If you don’t know this is a chance for AEM Developer nerds to shine. You can submit some “tip or trick” about how to enhance the AEM experience. And there were some great submissions. The winner this year was Brett Birschbach from HS2 Solutions. Brett is a good friend and as such he was gracious enough to take the time to chat with me after winning about how his AEM Remote Assets works.

On June 29th, Adobe released the first Service Pack for AEM 6.4. Aside from a minor version bump in the embedded Jackrabbit Oak engine (1.8.2 → 1.8.3, see Changelog here), there are some pretty useful updates in this Service Pack. Highlights include:
STARTTLS support for the Day CQ Mail service Expanded support for color profiles in Assets Many OOTB items have been moved from /etc to /conf to really drive the adoption of ConfMgr (check out Nate Yolles’ helpful article if you’re not sure what I’m talking about) Various TouchUI fixes, including in the new “cascading dropdown” fields Lots of expansion of ARIA (accessibility) features throughout the product Several performance fixes You can find more details in Adobe’s Release Notes, or download the update from Package Share.

I wrote an annoyed op-ed a while back about how the proper name for the AEM infrastructure was Author, PUBLISH, and Dispatcher. Not Publisher. Definitely NOT Publisher. It’s the wrong word. I still get annoyed by people who can’t be bothered to learn the correct term. Or who are just too lazy to correct themselves. But maybe it’s time to change.
Perhaps I can excuse lay people who aren’t familiar with the infrastructure, or marketing managers who just needed to know enough to green light the purchase of AEM, but not people who should know better.